


Celestial Stars Above

by Anonymous



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Donquixote Doflamingo Being an Asshole, Dubious Morality, Gen, I didn't know that was a tag but it's beautiful, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Mental Instability, Revolutionary Doflamingo, Self-Indulgent, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-24 01:33:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30064629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Kaido's right-hand man, Jack, attempted to rescue Donquixote Doflamingo after the events of Dressrosa. He failed, but the Revolutionaries didn't.
Relationships: Donquixote "Corazon" Rosinante & Trafalgar D. Water Law, Donquixote Doflamingo & Donquixote "Corazon" Rosinante, Donquixote Doflamingo & Trafalgar D. Water Law
Kudos: 16
Collections: anonymous





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is very self-indulgent. I never really understood why Doflamingo of canon took to working under the World Government even after he was pretty much turned away twice, although I can see why he would, since he would have more influence. This is a take on a Doflamingo that held more resentment towards the Celestial Dragons. 
> 
> I'll have to warn you that it's been a while since I watched One Piece. I might get events wrong, or character's depictions wrong.

He woke to stark-white ceiling and the ever-swishing murmurs of calm waves that seemed to permeate every inch of this world. Nothing came to mind and nothing came to thought. His head was filled with overgrown cotton, swathes of white cloth—like protruding bones—draped around his still body. He listened for a moment, little pieces of memory filtering back in. 

Maroon markings, and pitch-black arms. Brilliant pain. Cold seastone. And a horrible, stifling darkness, like the kind he’d hidden himself in with Rosinante back when they were kids, away from the vitriolic mob. Rosinante—the name alone upended a chestful of locked fury, and veins popped on his forehead. 

That’s right, he’d been betrayed not once, twice, but three times! Rosinante, Law, Viola—cursed woman! She was a passionate one, beautiful in a way only the warmth of a flame could possess, though dangerous all the same. His hands clenched tight, chains clinking—betrayal was the one crime he could not forgive. 

Clinking? He glanced down in confusion. There, on both his wrists, were the telltale appearances of seastone cuffs that tied him to the gatch bed railings. The same were applied to his feet, along with a strap that tied his waist down. The room was small, with only one entrance and a tiny circular window in the pale, stone walls that let in bright sunlight. It hurt his eyes to look at, even with his sunglasses, and he shifted his focus to the stone ledge protruding from the walls, with a single chair just underneath. 

He winced when his wounds were josled at the slight movement, glancing down at his suddenly exposed midriff. He noticed three things: the first, was that he was dressed in clean, white slacks and shirt; the second, that there was a long, centered stitch-line which ran up his navel all the way into his shirt, perhaps up to his chest; the third, was that the strings which previously held his organs together were gone, although his innards still felt tender. Granted, that was a good thing, as his inner-organs-held-together-by-string idea was supposed to be an emergency solution, but it was slightly concerning.

How long had he been out? Where was he? What happened to his crew? That damned Law! And Strawh— 

The barred door swung open, revealing a pleasant-looking young woman with bright orange hair and funky goggles on her newsboy—newsgirl?—cap. Ruffles lined her pale pink blouse, heading down to end at a dark skirt and stockings. She was unfamiliar to him. 

“You’re awake,” she acknowledged, giving him a nod. If he had feathers, he’d have puffed them out by now—instead he let himself simmer in unresolved anger, veins seemingly permanently popped on his forehead. Then, he let himself smile widely, the classic “Joker” smile he was famous for. 

“Oh? Little missy, seems you’re a bit young to be dealing with the big fish,” he taunted, letting himself fall back onto old routines. Tsuru had not given into his baits, and hadn’t even fulfilled his simple request for newspapers. He was bitter, caustic, but above all, he was bored. 

“You’ve long slipped out of the ocean,” she replied, giving no indication of any emotion besides neutrality. “Now, you’re just a caged fish in a plastic bag.” 

“Is that so? Perhaps I have something up my sleeve. Perhaps I am simply lowering your defenses. Who’s to say?” 

“I could never underestimate you,” she replied smoothly, inspecting the chains. “Perhaps you are the individual lowering their defenses.” 

He was taken back for a split second, before he laughed. It felt and sounded fake, even to his own ears, but it was so, so familiar. “I see, you already know who I am! I’d be concerned if you didn’t. Who are you, and which organization do you belong to? Pirates? Revolutionaries? The beasts from the underground? Maybe….an assassin from the World Government? You wouldn’t be the first.” 

He tugged on his chains, but they held tight. “I suppose it does not matter. All of you are enemies anyway, one way or another. Whatever you’re looking for, I don’t have it. If you want revenge, do it later. I’m tired right now.” 

“You do have one thing, don’t you?” The girl answered softly. In the still air, interrupted only by little bouts of splashes, it resounded such as an echo in an empty canyon. “Something on the Celestial Dragons that allowed you to get away with feigning a resignation from the Shichibukai.” 

This girl knew more than she first let on. Still, she was slightly off. “Fufu, did you listen? Power unrenewed will eventually degrade, that is inevitable. What I knew before has no meaning now—I can’t count on both hands how many times an assassin has targeted me since I was taken in by the marines.” 

“Doesn’t that mean they’re trying to shut you up?” 

“Both, perhaps. The tides are turning. The power imbalance is shifting from one side to the other quicker this year than that of the last twenty years. It’s quite enlightening.” 

“You’re avoiding the question,” she stated, crossing her arms. “What, exactly, is it, Donquixote?” 

“Doflamingo,” he corrected. The last time anyone had called him Donquixote besides in the context of his crew name, he’d killed them. It reminded him of the Celestial Dragons that’d turned him away at his lowest point—it’d satisfied him though, seeing their horrified expressions at the decapitated head in his hands. There was a part of him that liked being above the ordinary “humans”, using that name, though.

“Doflamingo,” she repeated, looking unamused. 

“And why, pray tell, do you expect me to cough it up when you haven’t even introduced yourself?” He mused, turning to peer at her expression. Her poker face was quite impressive. “That’s quite rude. If you’re trying to discern what it is, you should give an equally impressive secret in return, shouldn’t you?” 

She sat down on the chair, legs crossed and a small note-taking book out. “Donquixote Doflamingo, former Shichibukai, former captain of the Donquixote crew, former tyrant of Dressrosa, former Celestial Dragon. Underground alias: Joker. Thirty-one years old, with a frozen bounty of 340,000,000 beli.” 

“I applaud you on your investigation,” Doflamingo drawled, bored. She still hadn’t answered any of his burning questions—if she was anything like Tsuru, he might just curse his fate. Well, as if he hadn’t done that multiple times already. 

“You have one brother, Donquixote Rosinante, under the alias Corazon. Former Marine Commander.” 

He grinded his teeth, accidentally breaking the fragile skin of his inner cheek and causing copper to flood his mouth. Disgusting. He repeated the same phrase. “Congratulations on your investigation.” 

“Well, it’s a bit rude of me to know all this without introducing myself,” she suddenly said, smiling. Something about her smile infuriated Doflamingo—or perhaps it was his own inability to do anything in his current position. Even Conqueror’s Haki was useless if the user was incapicated by the drainage powers of seastone. “My name is Koala, no last name. I am a lieutenant of the Revolutionary army.” 

Doflamingo raised an eyebrow. “The Revolutionary Army?” 

“Yes,” Koala answered, eyes glinting and chin up. “Around a week ago, one of Kaido’s men, Jack, attempted to rescue you on your escort to Impel Down. His rescue attempt failed, but luckily, it gave us an opening to take the opportunity instead.” 

The Revolutionary Army. He’d read about their exploits in the newspapers, of their liberations, though they did not directly challenge the marines. They were like a shadow of a pulling wave, a menacing threat of what was to come. Surely, with the fall of the Donquixote family, they would prepare to make their move. 

Other than his knowledge of the secret weapon of Mariejois, for what else could they have use of him? Would they attempt to steal it, once they knew its location and what it had the potential to do? 

He peered at her cautiously, frowning. He was planning on blabbing out the weapon anyway, since it would no longer benefit him as its influence waned, although he didn’t want to tell the Revolutionary Army that information, of all people. “It would do you no good to know. You want something else, don’t you?” 

“Not exactly, but partly true,” Koala said, abandoning all pretense of a poker face and choosing instead to smile that scathingly fake smile. “I suppose I should get straight to the point. I want to know what information you held over the Celestial Dragons, and the locations of all the Donquixote family’s weapon stashes. Information on weapons dealers, manufacturers, and the Celestial Dragons. Everything you know, Joker.” 

“Go to hell,” Doflamingo said, curling his upper lip, curved sunglasses flashing red in the dim light. 

Koala kept smiling, cold eyes unmatched to the motion of her lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Koala may seem OOC for now, but she's talking to Doflamingo of all people, so I think she would be cautious around him. Doflamingo is the real challenge to write, however.


	2. Chapter 2

Dragon glanced up when the telltale signs of stomping clattered down the halls, the source of which burst through his office door with a huff of irritation. 

  
“Rough time?” He asked, sipping at his usual black coffee. It tasted disgusting, but high quality luxuries were not to be expected from their limited supplies. 

“More than rough!” Koala complained, dropping herself down onto the plush seat of one of the various wooden chairs scattered near his desk. “I don’t know what his motives are. He was more willing to divulge information than I thought, although my expectations were underground for somebody like him. Why didn’t we just go through with the usual extraction procedures for prisoners with information?” 

Dragon raised a hand. “What did you find out?” 

“It’s confirmed that he held some type of information over the Celestial Dragons,” Koala began to list off. “On the marine ship, he mentioned assassins were sent after him for this reason, so it would seem to be something important, however, apparently its influence is less prominent than before. It’s unclear if he is lying, if he’s intentionally leading us off the truth, or if it’s really true. Other than that, he revealed nothing else, especially around the topic of the Donquixote crew and their underground operations.”

“Excellent job,” Dragon replied, to which Koala preened under the praise. “As for your previous point—Terry, go ahead and explain.” 

A bearded man with a dog-head hat, faded navy-blue cloak and a cigarette in his mouth looked up from his bounty poster inspection behind Dragon. “From the Dressrosa reports and eyewitness accounts, the case is, Doflamingo is an extremely dangerous individual with little regard for other individuals. This was seen with both the Human Auctioning House on Grove 1 and the forced labor for the Dark Factory of Dressrosa, both of which were raided soon after.” 

Koala bristled at that, remembering pieces of her own past. 

“What’s interesting is this,” he continued on, folding his arms. “About a day or two after, Sabo managed to get into contact with the pirate Bellamy the Hyena, a former affiliate of the Donquixote pirates. From the information gathered, it appears that although Doflamingo is cautious enough to keep most of the truly crucial information to himself and his executives, he is a blowhard egotist. He has no problem revealing information such as the fact that he’s apparently killed his father at age ten, among other sources of his pride.” 

Dragon handed him a newspaper, the front page detailing the publicized defeat of Doflamingo at the hands of “Strawhat” Luffy and “Surgeon of Death” Trafalgar Law from the Worst Generation. The second one he handed him was a notice of Jack’s attempt at a rescue operation against the marine convoys, and the disappearance of Doflamingo’s body. 

“In addition, his closest executives—Vergo, Diamante, Pica and Trebol—are pawns he could not just discard,” Terry continued, holding up his finger. “Unfortunately, all have been rounded up by the marines, just as Doflamingo himself had been, and have likely been sentenced to Impel Down for their numerous crimes. Otherwise, it would give us an edge to use them as hostages.” 

“So what do you want me to do?” Koala asked, head cocked. 

Terry sat down next to her, opening his own notebook, before diving into their next move. 

* * *

The rustle of a feather caught his attention, the sound hauntingly familiar. 

"You again, Rosinante?" Doflamingo inquired, the full name still strange on his tongue thirteen years later. It wasn’t often he found himself in a lucid dream, but when he did, it was always the same scene—he was in the derelict shack his mother died in, her rotting corpse frozen still under a threadbare blanket, and Rosinante near the door. His face was always shadowed underneath his maroon hood, as if to mimic a vampire that could not touch sunlight. 

But of course, even in his dreams, the Rosinante he knew had a bleeding heart.

“You know, I never thought I’d see the day Law defeat you, Doffy,” he commented, lighting his cigarette. Even in the ensuing lighted flicker of a flame, his face remained unseen, besides the red of his lips. 

“Don’t call me that,” Doflamingo replied stiffly. The name felt too intimate on a moving corpse, even in a dream. “Besides, you never saw that day. You’re dead. I killed you.” 

“You did,” Rosinante replied, nodding. He didn’t light up his feather jacket on accident this time, and though Doflamingo used to feel relief at that sight, now, it only felt strangely out of place. “You shot me fourteen times, right here, and here, and….” He pointed at the bullet holes in his body, matted blood still surrounding the wounds. 

“Enough!” Doflamingo yelled, veins popping on his neck. “Leave! Wasn’t it enough you stole the Ope Ope fruit with Law under my eyes? Not only that, but betraying me—and the family—and always trying to convince us to let go of our natural birthright—”

The words came out in a virulent storm, his bitterness and his pent-up resentment pouring out such as a waterfall does. Rosinante was dead! How dare he still lecture him, his dream or otherwise, even after he was gone! 

“ —Doffy, our birthright is gone,” Rosinante replied, sounding tired. “We never were gods, in the first place, only treated as such. We were always human—that’s why mother died of what should’ve been a normal sickness. It’s why father died, why we still needed to eat, even as ‘gods’ from Mariejois—why I died. None of us were born superior, we just thought we were.” 

“You’ve always had that sickening compassion of yours, just like father,” Doflamingo hissed. “You don’t get it. The strong and the weak are born to their fates—you and I were born at the apex. We were destined to be at the top, and you chose to throw that away for  _ him _ .”

"Then was mother weak?"

"...Yes."

“No,  _ you  _ don’t get it,” Rosinante refuted, lips pursed. There was a strange knocking at the door, suddenly, slow and methodical.  _ Tap, tap, tap _ . Rosinante turned his back at Doflamingo, before pushing at the wooden door with a harsh  _ creak _ . 

“Don’t bother coming back,” Doflamingo threatened. 

Rosinante kept his back turned as it opened, light—from the sun? From the flames of the pursuers? —flooding into the shack. He didn’t answer. 

Doflamingo woke, the only indication of such, a stuttering half-beat of a breath. He almost felt rested for once. Usually his dreams consisted of the acrid smell of black smoke and the harrowing brightness of yellow-and-red flames peeking into wet blindfolds, the vociferous clamor of a bloodthirsty mob hellbent on revenge. And fiber ropes, always the ropes. 

“Good morning,” Koala greeted from the side. If Doflamingo were any less practiced at maintaining a poised and collected facade, he would’ve jumped. As such, he only had a mild internal heart attack. What was this woman doing in his...prison cell first thing in the morning?! 

“Are you here to glean information again?” He tossed out, exhaling from his nose. He was still strapped to the bed. It was quite uncomfortable—even Tsuru had given him more room to freely move—but at least it wasn’t the stone cold floor and thin zebra stripe clothing. Already, he missed his bright pink feather jacket. He felt almost exposed without it. 

“Are you willing to divulge?” She asked, smiling infuriatingly. Doflamingo grinned maniacally. 

  
“What do you think the answer is?” 

“Hopefully the information,” she hummed. “But I assume you’re not willing?” 

She was observant, that was for sure. She'd called out to him as soon as she'd noticed his half-stutter in breath, had picked up on his signs already. She reminded him of Monet. 

Koala tapped the rubber end of the paper on her notepad, the swishing sounds of gentle waves bobbing against the shore coming from the open window. It was barely dawn, the peeking sun just barely contrasted against the deep-violet-and-orange blotched sky. It was the first time he’d thought about how lucky he was, to see the sunrise rather than stuck thousands of meters below the sea, in the sixth level of Impel Down. It was infinitely more difficult to escape from there than here, that was certain. 

“The News Coo,” Doflamingo started, eyes focused on the way the pencil moved in calm scritches. It paused. “I assume it doesn’t come here, seeing as nobody knows where the Revolutionary Army is based.” 

Koala hummed in acknowledgement, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. 

“Then I suppose I’ll have to ask you for news,” he continued, tilting his head back. “If you have newspapers, I’d like to get a copy everyday. Otherwise, it’ll be quite boring.” 

“Well….I would be willing, but you should give something equivalent in response,” Koala replied with faux cheerfulness, pretending to ponder the request for a bit before. 

_ This woman… _ Doflamingo thought, and a burst of mirthfulness came through his lips, chest shaking at the response. “Interesting! Alright, alright, but first, convince me you have news in the first place. Then, perhaps I will consider.” 

Consider he won’t. If they’re looking for information, then he’ll lead them blindly to their deaths. Hopefully, he wouldn’t have to stay here long—escape was his primary option, especially before the torture that was certainly going to occur at some point. 

Koala pulled out a newspaper from the satchel draped across her shoulders and hung at the side. “This is today’s issue. Of course, we do not get our news directly from the News Coo; our intelligence officer takes care of that issue. I’ll consider last week’s as well based on what you say.” 

Doflamingo cocked his head at the headlines on the pages. Disappointingly enough, the front news seemed to be things he knew before—though it seemed the turmoil of the new age was finally upon them. “The island of shooting stars. Do with that as you will.”

Koala stared at him for a few seconds, maintaining a clear eye contact unnervingly. Doflamingo grinned nonchalantly, leaning back on his covers. 

Then, she left the cell abruptly without giving the news. He wondered if she’d seen through his lie, somehow, when even Trebol couldn’t tell when he did. 

_ Well, it definitely leads somewhere special, _ he thought, yawning, before glancing down at his cuffs. _ Let’s figure out just how tight they cuffed these things.  _


End file.
